It took all of one day for 340 people to raise more than enough money to make sure the Aurora Pride Parade will take place this year.

Donors contributed $19,000 through the GoFundMe page put up by Indivisible Aurora, organizers of the parade — some $2,000 more than the $17,000 organizers said they needed to keep the parade alive for 2019.

It came less than a day after city of Aurora officials and members of Indivisible Aurora announced that the parade effort still was on during a regular press briefing by Mayor Richard Irvin.

At that briefing, Irvin announced that Indivisible Aurora officials reversed a previous decision to cancel the parade based on not being able to raise enough money. The parade is costlier this year because of updated regulations in the city’s special events ordinance that hiked costs of security.

While private parade organizers have always had to pay for the security costs, they are higher now because the city uses fencing along the parade route, and other barriers.

Chuck Adams, Indivisible Aurora director, said the organization had a GoFundMe page up for months and only raised a fraction of what they needed. He said he thinks organizers and parade supporters took for granted that the event would go on in 2019.

“We were so successful last year, it just never occurred to me it might not go,” Adams said.

He said the Indivisible Aurora board decided they had to cancel to let vendors and other organizations that were scheduling their summers know “sooner than later.”

But Irvin and city officials made Indivisible Aurora aware of grants the city has available to organizations for just such events, and came up with a $3,000 grant for the event. Aurora Downtown, a consortium of downtown property and business owners that oversees the downtown special service area, donated another $1,500.

That still left the organization $17,000 short, but it raised more than that in a day.

The parade is scheduled for Sunday, June 9. Originally, the event was to be two days, and it still will be, Adams said. So some speakers will be part of the event on Saturday, June 8, and other things will be scheduled, he said. But a planned 5K run, and vendors that were going to be there, have been canceled.

Adams said Indivisible Aurora will leave the GoFundMe page up through the end of April, as originally planned. Any money raised beyond what is needed this year will be carried over for 2020, he said.

He admitted he was surprised by the “intensity of the backlash” the organization got when the parade was canceled.

“The lesson for us is, this community wants and needs this event even more than we realized,” he said.